A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

Oliver looked where Rofus had indicated. The man made a good point. It could simply have been an odd squirrel, or it might have been disturbed by something. The tracks didn't look particularly fresh, given that they were half filled in with snow, but it wasn't as though Oliver could tell that much from that.

He looked around, trying to find a cause for the squirrel's odd movements. Some sort of reason that he could blame it on.

Rofus wandered off. "I think I've got em', Ser," he said, in as excited a voice as a man could do when he was whispering.

The others had recovered enough to join him. Just a little distance away from where the squirrel tracks had been sighted, there was a considerably larger disturbance through the snow. Enough sets of footprints laid over each other that single pairs were hardly distinguishable. Oliver would have guessed at least five people had used that narrow track.

"Alright," he said, feeling a good bit of relief to have something solid to follow. They'd only been following their instincts for ten minutes, searching blindly for any signs of life, but even that had taken its toll. With no experience in tracking to fall back on, Oliver's doubts had begun to creep in. "Good work, Sergeant. We go slower from here. Keep your eyes on the trees, just in case."

"Yes, Ser," Rofus said, grinning. The man was like a child in many ways. A rather irritating child, mostly.

They set off again, following the tracks this time, keeping to the trees on either side of them when they could, so that they wouldn't be so easily to spot if someone were to look down the trail. The men too seemed to have a greater amount of sureness in their step now that they had something to follow.

Their fatigue seemed to build up less quickly and they went for longer, following a more direct route straight into the heart of the woods.

Again, Oliver paused them after a distance, to give them time. He himself took a drink from a cold stream after breaking the ice, sensing that they were nearing what they were looking for. A couple of the men stooped to join him.

Then, it was back to the track they went, silently skulking through the trees.

After a while longer, the trail widened even more, as the evidence of more feet began to show through. It led off to various branching paths, each heading different ways into the forest. The trail now was less compressed snow and now more hardened ice with just fresh snow on top – the evidence of hard and long use.

It was beginning to seem to Oliver like the whole situating of half their men in the forest was less about creating a trap and more about an extra layer in their defensive structure. The more Oliver dwelled on that, the more it made sense.

Half their men permanently – or semi-permanently – in the fort and the other half in the forest. That way they didn't have to necessarily react to whatever foes might appear. They were immune even to surprise attacks. As long as the fort was able to hold for a while, then the men in the woods would be able to help them.

Soon they'd slowed so much that they were practically walking. There were too many paths and too many footprints for them to tell where it was safe to walk. They were creeping at this point, wherever the trees were the thickest, staying as low to the ground as they could. Oliver could feel the acute nervousness of the men even without looking at them.

They were truly walking towards the lion's den and even Oliver himself was beginning to feel a trickle of anxiety. Find your next read at My Virtual Library Empire

They watched, expecting a man to come at any second. They'd creep for a distance and then take a long pause, unable to move further, guided by Oliver's intuition. Oliver paused again, expectantly. He'd freed his sword from his sheath a few minutes earlier, making the men even more nervous. They'd rushed to copy him.

Eventually, their patience was rewarded, as they heard the approach of something loud and heavy.

A rhythmic noise, unmistakable. Not the clopping of animal hooves, nor the flutter of a particularly weighty bird. It was a man. Their eyes confirmed it for a certainty. A man of particularly poor repute from the looks of him. He walked with the swagger of a drunkard, his eyes half-glazed and the untended to spittle on the corner of his mouth beginning to frost over.

It was their target, for a certainty. Or at the very least, it was one of them. All of the waiting men tensed together and they held themselves flat against the snow. If not for the fallen branches interwoven in the white, they would have been all the more obvious. Not that they could really get more obvious that much more obvious than the perfect navy blue of their outfits.

The man's drunkenness was enough to get him to walk by their hiding place, barely batting an eye. He had a bucket in his hand and a rather large knife sheathed at his hip. He looked less like a bandit and more just a normal peasant. Had Oliver seen him walking through Solgrim, he wouldn't have thought twice.

But they weren't in Solgrim, however unfortunate that might have been for the man. Unbeknownst to him, he'd walked straight through the wolf's den. Oliver's men barely saw him move. One moment he was crouched with the rest of them, and then he was stalking forward as sure-footed as any woodland predator.

Then in a flash, his sword was against the man's throat and he was dragging him back into the trees, well away from the path.

The man struggled just for a moment, his legs kicking and a voice rising in his throat, about to shout something. The cold steel against his Adam's apple provided an adequate refutation of all those actions. He quickly grew stiff and allowed himself to go limp into the arms of the manhandling, if only to keep a hold of his life a little longer.